Amtrak Trains To Stop Using Grand Central

Amtrak, the federally financed passenger rail system that serves both Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central Terminal, said yesterday that it would consolidate all its operations at Penn Station as early as 1990.

The railroad said a 10-mile track extension, to be built over a long-unused freight-track bed on the West Side would bypass Grand Central and join with the Spuyten Duyvil Bridge. The bridge, which spans the Harlem River and connects Manhattan and the Bronx, has been closed since 1982. It will be rehabilitated and reopened.

The bypass will allow, for the first time since the construction of the great rail tunnels, a direct route south through New York City from the Hudson River Valley. Convenience Cited

A tunnel already under construction at 34th Street will connect the track extension with Penn Station. Amtrak officials said the bypass would make the system more convenient to use and was expected to attract 250,000 additional passengers annually. It would also shorten by a few minutes the trip between New York and such points north as Albany and Montreal, Amtrak said.

The officials said the final pieces of the project came together over the last few days with an agreement between the railroad and the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, which owns property that Amtrak must tunnel under from Penn Station to the West Side track bed.

''This has been a gleam in the eye of transportation planners for a long, long time,'' an Amtrak spokesman, R. Clifford Black 4th, said. ''We finally have the momentum to go forward.''

For most of this century, many train passengers traveling through New York have had to make their own way between Grand Central and Penn Station because the two were built by different rail companies, the New York Central Railroad and the Pennsylvania Railroad, and never connected. Mr. Black said that it was not known how many passengers traveling through New York City made the connection between the two and that most of the anticipated new riders would be those who had not ridden Amtrak specifically because of the connection problem.

About 100 Amtrak trains use Penn Station each day, Mr. Black said. They carry 5.5 million passengers annually. Eighteen Amtrak trains use Grand Central each day, for a total of one million passengers a year, he said.

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The project, first reported in New York Newsday, is expected to cost $85 million, 40 percent, or $34 million, of which will be paid by the State Department of Transportion. The remaining $51 million is to be paid by Amtrak, Mr. Black said.

Although Grand Central will continue to serve Metro-North commuters, primarily from Connecticut and Westchester County, it will no longer be the terminal for passengers between New York City and northern points, including Buffalo and Montreal. Minimal Impact

Patricia Raley, a spokeswoman for Metro-North, which operates Grand Central as a unit of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said that the Amtrak departure would mean the loss of $600,000 a year in electrical and service fees, but that given the railroad's $447 million budget, the impact would be minimal.

Mr. Black of Amtrak said that although there is a rail link between Penn Station and Grand Central, a train would have to go through Queens, the Bronx, parts of Westchester and then back 35 miles over different tracks - a trip that would take even longer than it does to cross Manhattan at midday and that would be ''totally unfeasible.''

Amtrak trains now serve all points south of Penn Station, and a northbound line from the station serves New Haven and Boston. The bypass project, planned since 1982, will take those trains that previously traveled from Grand Central underground through Manhattan and put them above ground along the Hudson River, from the Javits Center tunnel to the Spuyten Duyvil Bridge. On the Bronx side, trains will link up with existing tracks. The Amtrak line to Grand Central will continue to be used by Metro-North. Agreement from Conrail

The two key factors of the bypass plan, Amtrak officials said, were obtaining rights to the freight track, which carried its last load in 1980 -three cars of frozen turkeys - and reaching the agreement with the Javits Center.

Mr. Black said that because the track was owned by Conrail, the Federal freight system, and was not being used, permission to use it was readily forthcoming. Negotiations with Javits Center officials were complicated by the fact that the center has long-range plans to build above the site. Thus, the cost of additional support systems had to be factored into the agreement.

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A version of this article appears in print on July 7, 1988, on Page B00001 of the National edition with the headline: Amtrak Trains To Stop Using Grand Central. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe